Adult penicillin allergy programmes in Australian hospitals: a practical guide from the National Antibiotic Allergy Network.

Penicillin allergy is a significant burden on patient, prescribing and hospital outcomes. There has been increasing interest in the incorporation of penicillin allergy testing (i.e.

Communicated priors tune the perception of control.

Action allows us to shape the world around us. But to act effectively we need to accurately sense what we can and cannot control. Classic theories across cognitive science suppose that this 'sense of agency' is constructed from the sensorimotor signals we experience as we interact with our surroundings.

Defining key concepts for mental state attribution.

The terminology used in discussions on mental state attribution is extensive and lacks consistency. In the current paper, experts from various disciplines collaborate to introduce a shared set of concepts and make recommendations regarding future use.

Federated inference and belief sharing.

This paper concerns the distributed intelligence or federated inference that emerges under belief-sharing among agents who share a common world-and world model. Imagine, for example, several animals keeping a lookout for predators. Their collective surveillance rests upon being able to communicate their beliefs-about what they see-among themselves.

Isolation and Characterization of Bacterial Endophytes from Small Nodules of Field-Grown Peanut.

It is evident that legume root nodules can accommodate rhizobial and non-rhizobial bacterial endophytes. Our recent nodule microbiome study in peanuts described that small nodules can harbor diverse bacterial endophytes. To understand their functional role, we isolated 87 indigenous endophytes from small nodules of field-grown peanut roots and characterized them at molecular, biochemical, and physiological levels.

Consciousness beyond the human case.

There is growing interest in the relationship been AI and consciousness. Joseph LeDoux and Jonathan Birch thought it would be a good moment to put some of the big questions in this area to some leading experts. The challenge of addressing the questions they raised was taken up by Kristin Andrews, Nicky Clayton, Nathaniel Daw, Chris Frith, Hakwan Lau, Megan Peters, Susan Schneider, Anil Seth, Thomas Suddendorf, and Marie Vanderkerckhoeve.

Inborn Errors of Immunity in Children With Invasive Pneumococcal Disease: A Multicenter Prospective Study.

Background: In settings with universal conjugate pneumococcal vaccination, invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) can be a marker of an underlying inborn error of immunity. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence and characterize the types of immunodeficiencies in children presenting with IPD.

Methods: Multicenter prospective audit following the introduction of routinely recommended immunological screening in children presenting with IPD.

Treatment of severe acute necrotizing encephalopathy of childhood with interleukin-6 receptor blockade in the first 24 h as add-on immunotherapy shows favorable long-term outcome at 2 years.

Background: Acute necrotizing encephalopathy (ANE) of childhood is a rare and devastating infection-associated acute encephalopathy. While there are no consensus treatments for ANE, recent case reports suggest a beneficial role for the use of tocilizumab, a recombinant humanized monoclonal antibody against the interleukin-6 (IL-6) receptor. The correlation of the timing of add-on tocilizumab in relation to long-term outcome has not been reported.

Consciousness, (meta)cognition, and culture.

Our conscious experience is determined by a combination of top-down processes (e.g., prior beliefs) and bottom-up processes (e.

The mystery of the brain-culture interface.

Nature and culture work together to shape who we are. We are embedded in culture and are profoundly influenced by what those around us say and do. The interface between minds occurs at the level of explicit metacognition, which is at the top of our brain's control hierarchy.

Animacy and the prediction of behaviour.

To survive, all animals need to predict what other agents are going to do next. We review neural mechanisms involved in the steps required for this ability. The first step is to determine whether an object is an agent, and if so, how sophisticated it is.

Precision and the Bayesian brain.

Scientific thinking about the minds of humans and other animals has been transformed by the idea that the brain is Bayesian. A cornerstone of this idea is that agents set the balance between prior knowledge and incoming evidence based on how reliable or 'precise' these different sources of information are - lending the most weight to that which is most reliable. This concept of precision has crept into several branches of cognitive science and is a lynchpin of emerging ideas in computational psychiatry - where unusual beliefs or experiences are explained as abnormalities in how the brain estimates precision.

Helping the waiter to hold his tray: Rigid haptic linkage promotes inter-personal motor coordination.

When a glass is lifted from a tray, there is a challenge for the waiter. He must quickly compensate for the reduction in the weight of the tray to keep it balanced. This compensation is easily achieved if the waiter lifts the glass himself.

Aberrant effective connectivity is associated with positive symptoms in first-episode schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorder thought to result from synaptic dysfunction that affects distributed brain connectivity, rather than any particular brain region. While symptomatology is traditionally divided into positive and negative symptoms, abnormal social cognition is now recognized a key component of schizophrenia. Nonetheless, we are still lacking a mechanistic understanding of effective brain connectivity in schizophrenia during social cognition and how it relates to clinical symptomatology.

Pandemics and the great evolutionary mismatch.

Dezecache et al. argue that affiliation and contact-seeking are key responses to danger. These natural social tendencies are likely to hinder the observance of physical distancing during the current pandemic.

I haven't a clue! Expectations based on repetitions and hints facilitate perceptual experience of ambiguous images.

In recent years, the role of top-down expectations on perception has been extensively researched within the framework of predictive coding. However, less attention has been given to the different sources of expectations, how they differ, and how they interact. In this article, we examined the effects of informative hints on perceptual experience and how these interact with repetition-based expectations to create a long-lasting effect.

Knowing Ourselves Together: The Cultural Origins of Metacognition.

Metacognition - the ability to represent, monitor and control ongoing cognitive processes - helps us perform many tasks, both when acting alone and when working with others. While metacognition is adaptive, and found in other animals, we should not assume that all human forms of metacognition are gene-based adaptations. Instead, some forms may have a social origin, including the discrimination, interpretation, and broadcasting of metacognitive representations.

The neural basis of consciousness.

Consciousness has evolved and is a feature of all animals with sufficiently complex nervous systems. It is, therefore, primarily a problem for biology, rather than physics. In this review, I will consider three aspects of consciousness: level of consciousness, whether we are awake or in a coma; the contents of consciousness, what determines how a small amount of sensory information is associated with subjective experience, while the rest is not; and meta-consciousness, the ability to reflect upon our subjective experiences and, importantly, to share them with others.

The Global Workspace Needs Metacognition.

The two leading cognitive accounts of consciousness currently available concern global workspace (a form of working memory) and metacognition. There is relatively little interaction between these two approaches and it has even been suggested that the two accounts are rival and separable alternatives. Here, we argue that the successful function of a global workspace critically requires that the broadcast representations include a metacognitive component.

Learning rapidly about the relevance of visual cues requires conscious awareness.

Humans have been shown to be capable of performing many cognitive tasks using information of which they are not consciously aware. This raises questions about what role consciousness actually plays in cognition. Here, we explored whether participants can learn cue-target contingencies in an attentional learning task when the cues were presented below the level of conscious awareness and how this differs from learning about conscious cues.